After seeing the sand paintings done by our friend Valerie on Taravai in the Gambiers, we promptly commissioned her to make one for us. We looked at pictures of her work and showed her our favorites, but left the entire design up to her. We only asked that she include our boat name on the piece. It wasn’t finished when we left the Gambiers and she promised to mail it to us in Tahiti. Yesterday we picked it up and we are absolutely delighted.

All of the substances (sand, dirt, ash) that she uses for her “paint” are from the island of Taravai and are the natural color of the found material – no color added. We are currently in the process of finding some hard poster type board to mount it on and we will be hanging it when we do.

There were three places in the Cook Islands where we left a trail: Suwarrow at the ranger station and in Penrhyn in the cruiser logbooks that are now at both villages (Omoka and Te Tautua). We were the very first entry into the Te Tautua logbook and we were quite honored.

I love the idea of these cruiser traditions. You might remember the map we left on Wallace Island, BC or our plank at Hot Springs Cove, BC. If you visit these places in the future and see our mark, please take a picture and send it to us.

At Suwarrow I made a palm frond wreath, the type that can be made for a headdress or a necklace and put our card in the center.

Here is our entry in the Omoka logbook next to a card from SV Freya. When we went to return the book a card dropped out and it was friends of ours in Victoria BC. We re-took our picture of our log entry with their card.

And our entry on the first page of the brand new Te Tautua logbook in which I misspelled Penrhyn *sigh* twice:

Where next? Who knows.

This pole in Skidegate, just East of Queen Charlotte CIty, is special because it was the first pole carved and raised by the Haida people in more than a century. Imagine that – no one alive had raised a pole before and the traditional method, which they employed, is to raise it from the ground to standing with ropes and human muscles. It was carved by Bill Reid and raised in 1978 and is 25 meters tall.

The raising of this pole was a resurrection of what had been a tremendously important part of the Haida culture. To date, a number of other poles have been raised.

Most of the poles that we saw in the park were either partially or fully decomposed which was a conscious decision on the part of the Haida people – letting the old poles return to earth rather than attempting to preserve them. They do remove the moss from the standing poles at SGaang Gwaii (more on that World Heritage Site later).

I love this pole because the unpainted cedar is more striking to me. The natural wood allows the eyes to focus on the skill of the carver and the grain of the wood rather than the vivid colors often used as paints.

The dogfish looks like a wee shark by the way. We caught (and released) one.

Thanks to Behan of SV Totem for suggesting the program HugIn with which I stitched together this panorama from 3 separate pictures. It is freeware if anyone wants their own copy.